Content
THIS OLD HOUSE KITCHENS
Wendy Richmond, WGBH
WGBH, which produces one-third of all public broadcast programming, has been producing interactive titles for eight years. While most of those have been for the education market (including Interactive Nova) the company is now expanding into the consumer market with titles based on its existing library of television programs.
The first of these projects is This Old House Kitchens, based on the home improvement program “This Old House.” The title, which was shown in prototype form, was designed not as a how-to guide (à la Books That Work), but more to inspire the user to create the best kitchen possible before going to a decorator or contractor with a plan.
By using this title, WGBH believes homeowners will have a better sense of how their kitchens should look and why, and at what cost. The program is guided by Steve Thomas, who is the host of the television program.
The program begins with a questionnaire intended to establish the parameters of the redecoration project. The answers to such questions as “How long do you plan to stay in your house? How much are you able to spend? Do you have kids? Do you entertain a lot? What major activities take place in your kitchen?” are saved in a database, which becomes very useful as you navigate through the program.
For example, you may decide that a particular kitchen layout is what you are looking for, but the program, knowing your stated budget, warns you that those changes may be too expensive.
Once all of the questions have been answered, the viewer moves out of the planning section and into the design section. By simply moving images of stoves, refrigerators, sinks and windows on a floor plan (based on six basic kitchen designs), a replica of one’s own kitchen is created, which becomes the basis for any changes that are being contemplated.
This replica is more a blueprint than a real facsimile of a kitchen, but it does enable the user to view the plans from different perspectives or orientations. That is, if your image of your kitchen comes from the view from the outside door, or the entrance to the kitchen, you can set that perspective. Of course, there are measuring tools and everything is to scale. In addition, design guidelines and tips will pop up as you contemplate changes.
For example, kitchen design is based around a work triangle between the stove, the sink and the refrigerator. If your design has too much distance between these points, Steve will pop up on screen and explain what you have done wrong.
The entire program is designed to allow the user to associate freely with different design elements and ideas, while keeping in mind the constraints of budget and intended usage, before committing to the expense of hiring professionals.
It is with this in mind that the program also includes galleries of photographs of designer kitchens. These can be viewed in different contexts, such as counters, or lighting or appliances or kitchen shapes.
The user is also able to tag these photographs for future reference, with annotation for future searches such as, “I like this tile pattern” or “This is a great looking oven.” You can then search for all photographs that have ovens that you like. In addition, video clips from the television show are available at relevant points in the application.
After you have determined the physical layout of your kitchen, you can open up a photorealistic image of a kitchen counter, with appliances, cabinets and floors. Then, from an extensive collection of digital material swatches, you can see how your kitchen might look given your chosen mix of textures, colors and surfaces.
The prototype for This Old House Kitchens was developed for the CD-I platform. WGBH plans to develop the title for Mac and Windows as well as other appropriate platforms. It will sell for approximately $50, and will be released later this year.
EXPLORA
Steve Nelson, Brilliant Media
Steve Nelson is president of Brilliant Media, the San Francisco-based interactive media designer hired to put together rock star Peter Gabriel’s first interactive CD-ROM.
Debuting the disc at Digital World, Nelson described Gabriel’s Explora as “Grandma and Me for adults.” The design concept behind this program is as follows: as you explore the world of music and Peter Gabriel’s world, you find different objects, each of which allows you to do new things. Finding a backstage pass, for example, allows you backstage at a music festival. (If you find all of the objects, you get an unidentified surprise.)
In addition to things that you would expect to find on an interactive record, such as lyrics scrolling with the music and enabling random access to particular words, or music videos accompanying some of the songs, the CD-ROM is an exploration of both Gabriel’s music (from his recent album Us) and the genre known as “world music,” which Gabriel frequently incorporates into his own work.
In different parts of Explora, the user is able to witness behind-the-scenes footage of the recording of an album: listen to interpretations of the music by Gabriel; learn about some of the instruments used, including custom-made instruments (you can “play” them yourself), and join an international music festival. There are other things to do and areas to explore as well.
The Explora experience revolves around a tour of Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in England. You can navigate the grounds of this stunning facility and enter any room you wish. For example, if you enter the engineering booth, you can make your own mix of one of Gabriel’s songs, “Digging in the Dirt.” If you decide to enter the recording studio, you find that you have a chance to participate in a jam session of 25 musicians from around that world, and work with Brian Eno as your producer. You choose who plays with whom, and you can hear the results of those pairings.
Gabriel commissioned different artists to create works based on the music from “Us.” On this disc, each of those pieces is included, along with interactive elements added to the work, including animation, interviews with the artists, etc. All of this is included to give more understanding of the music to the listener, as well as allowing the listener to make deeper connections and individual interpretations of the music and lyrics.
Explora also includes a map of the world, with examples of music from different regions, and an inside look at the World of Music, Art and Dance Festival (also known as WOMAD), of which Gabriel is a producer.
Gabriel was very involved in the production of this disc. He also plays host and guide on your tour. In addition, since Gabriel owns all of his music and videos (which is unusual in the record business) the cost of producing such a disc was greatly reduced. He has recently started a new division of his music company called Real World Multimedia, which can be expected to produce more of these kinds of products.
One interesting note about this CD: In order to include all of the different elements on this disc, Nelson chose not to include the music in Red Book audio format (the standard CD-Audio spec). Instead, the music was compressed to leave more room on the disc for high-quality images and video. This flies in the face of common wisdom that good-quality music is more important than the quality of images and video; we’ll be anxious to hear from Nelson how the market responds. The disc will be released later this summer for about $50.
VOYEUR
David Riordan, POV
We wrote about Voyeur while it was still being filmed (see Vol. 2, No. 7, p. 12). At Digital World, David Riordan, creative director of POV (a Philips production studio) was able to demonstrate a nearly complete title.
The goal of POV is to “combine the best of what we know about movies and television with what we know about games,” according to Riordan. POV has three titles in production for the CD-I platform, all of which he calls “interactive movies.”
Voyeur is an adult title, approximately equivalent to an R-rated movie in theme, language and sexual situations. According to Riordan, the interactive notion of this title is to explore how much will you, the viewer, get involved in the story.
Here is the scenario: you are a voyeur. You have an apartment that overlooks the mansion of a very wealthy businessman who is contemplating entering the race for the presidency of the United States. But that is not all he is contemplating. There is infidelity, intrigue and murder. From your vantage point, you watch the story unfold.
The fiction plays out in real time; that is, there are a number of activities all going on at the same time. You may focus on one scene, and miss a critical piece of action in a different room. Or, you may switch between rooms on the fly, and enter in the middle of a conversation.
The goal is to gather enough evidence about the goings-on in the millionaire’s residence. If you feel you have enough evidence to bust the presidential candidate to be, you can call the police and turn him in. Or, you can get more involved in the story and actually try to save the person who is to be murdered.
There are 65 minutes of video and 39 audio scenes that play out behind closed venetian blinds (which helps POV maneuver around the censorship problem). There are four different murder scenarios, which launch at random. You choose how to navigate through the mansion and when and if to make a phone call to the police or the house.
A single “run through” of the movie is intended to take about 30–40 minutes (if you don’t get yourself killed or arrested first). Riordan hopes that the title will generate 30–40 hours of play by people who buy it, which appears to be a standard for a successful video game.
According to Riordan, the challenge in interactive fiction is the balance between emotion and strategy. “You need an interface that doesn’t pull you back and forth between suspended belief… and making a choice.” This indeed is the crux of the issue.
THE L.A. JOURNAL, VOL. 1
Bob Stein, The Voyager Co.>>
Bob Stein, a partner in The Voyager Company (which just moved to New York from Santa Monica), can always be expected to blow away your expectations of interactive media and create products that expand your perception of interactivity as well as your mind and emotions. He’s done so every year at Digital World, and this year’s demonstration was no exception.
Stein showed The L.A. Journal, Vol. 1, a laserdisc collection of literally hundreds of thousands of still photographs taken by Mark Brems. The question that Stein wants to answer with this disc concerns how we are going to present information that enables people to browse quickly and absorb slowly. The L.A. Journal allows the user to watch images whiz by on the screen at a full 30 images per second, and also slow it down, or freeze on particular images, for more in-depth viewing.
This title is better experienced than explained. To some, viewing still photos at 30 frames per second was beautiful; it gave others a headache. Yet Stein contends, and most in the audience agreed, that people are more able to absorb information quickly today, as witnessed by MTV and its ilk, than they used to be. This title was able to gather not just the moving images of television, but still images — each of which may itself be a work of art.
Voyager had Nikon create a camera that took half-frame images on motion picture film in the correct ratio for true motion picture viewing. That film is then processed through a scanner, a much more economical procedure than scanning individual slides. Therefore, in a single second of video, there is a “very complete sense of the space that (Brems) was in.”
As Stein put it, this is “both a coffee table book and a serious sociological study” of Los Angeles. Because he was able to include such a huge number of images, Brems was able to capture things that never make the final cut in a documentary or ordinary illustrated book. “It’s the kind of stuff that doesn’t normally make it into coffee table books because of the problems of color separations and printing (costs), but which we could do here with abandon.”
For example, in photographing a series of images of artist Keith Haring painting a mural, Brems followed him into a local hardware store and captured him buying his paints. In another series of images around Dodger Stadium, there are photographs of the press room and of the organ player.
The title includes 1,400 historical postcards and a lot of archival video. There are also three different soundtracks. (Only certain laserdisc players are able to read multiple soundtracks.) In addition to a score that was written to each image, there is a track of early Indian and Latino music, as well as poems by 14 local poets. To examine the entire collection carefully would take hundreds of hours.
For Stein, the challenge was integrating the capture device with the display medium. He wanted to discover how to create the images (or other media) for increasingly complex display technology. In this case, he wanted to know how we can experience a full-motion video, while at the same time have the capability to view individual images, each of which has its own value as distinct from the whole.
“I’m not sure we’ve solved the problem,” said Stein. “Perhaps all that’s been done is to point out that there is a problem.”
Problem or not, the Digital World audience was excited enough by this title that the majority of hands went up when asked if they would buy a laserdisc player simply to own The L.A. Journal. It is now available for $30 through Voyager or a local laserdisc retailer.
THE VIRTUAL BIOPARK
Glen Hoptman, Paramount Technology
Glen Hoptman, consulting producer to Paramount Technology Group, was unable to show the demo that he had planned. (He was unable to get permission from the publisher to show the work in public.) However, he was able to give a short presentation on The Virtual BioPark, and why object-oriented development is so significant for education and publishing as well as other applications.
The Virtual BioPark’s goal is to examine animal biology from a cross-discipline approach, involving not only science but art, history, anthropology, philosophy, etc. The developers built objects based on a series of animals, and allowed those objects to move across and interact with other objects.
Since each object has its inherent properties built in, the user is able to see the effects that the different objects have on each other. It would therefore be possible for the user to learn about the effects of different environments, including those that may be totally inappropriate and impossible to recreate naturally, on a particular animal/object.
Let’s say, for example, that we have a “polar bear” object. That object has certain properties, or characteristics, that cannot be changed. One of them may be that it needs to live in a certain climate. If you put that polar bear in the desert, you would be able to see how the polar bear reacts. More subtly, you might be able to see the effects of a warming environment on the polar bear population.
It is Hoptman’s belief that traditional academic disciplines have “hampered” our ability to understand dynamic relationships between different sciences and arts. “Information is a contextually rich set of data that we tend to take out of context,” according to Hoptman. Because of academic specialties and economic models that structure the publishing industry, there is very little room for learning in a “contextually rich” manner. “Information people are tyrants,” he said. “They are not interested in other people rearranging their work.”
This is where objects could revitalize how learning is handled. If these intelligent objects could be created and available across different applications and lessons, it would be possible to teach in a new way, without a hierarchical environment that is typical of most educational applications.
We were sorry to have missed the demo.
CRASH AND BURN AND TOTAL ECLIPSE
Judy Lange, Crystal Dynamics
Judy Lange is one of the cofounders of Crystal Dynamics, a start-up software development company that is focusing its efforts on developing games for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer. The company’s first two titles, Crash and Burn, and Total Eclipse, are both post-apocalyptic action/adventure titles that make significant use of 3DO’s fast three-dimension graphics rendering, as well as limited use of video.
Lange spoke about the future of Crystal Dynamics, which has very big goals indeed: It intends to be “the developer and publisher of CD-ROMs for 32-bit home entertainment.” Its start is the game business.
The company’s belief that the game industry is still in its nascent stages, “where Hollywood was during the Keystone Kops era,” without significant story development and with poor sound and pictures, and simplistic characters. It is placing bets that the game business is going to grow and change like Hollywood has during the past 50 years. It is to this end that the company recently hired the president of Twentieth Century Fox, Strauss Zelnick, to lead the company.
Critical to reaching this goal is character development and environment creation, which will bring increased realism to the world of games. This, however, was the single biggest issue in the discussion that followed her presentation: How can we continue to justify the violence and amoral attitudes that pervade most games today, especially as they become more realistic and life-like?
Lange promised that “we are being very cautious in what we do.” But Lange’s demonstration videos themselves did not make a very good case for character and story development, and aroused some very strong emotions as people discussed the idea that the new technologies should enable developers to strive for higher goals than simply violent action/adventure games. When asked if they would buy a 3DO player for either of Crystal Dynamics’ titles, virtually no hands went up in the audience.
We wonder if it’s possible that both Crystal Dynamics and 3DO itself have incorrectly assumed that the adolescent male teenager market may have peaked. It’s clear that Crystal Dynamics and 3DO will have to move beyond the arcade market if their medium is to expand beyond the teenage male market.
THE MATRIX
Peter Black, Xiphias
Peter Black, president of Xiphias, showed a prototype interface for movies in digital form, called The Matrix. The idea is to break out the different elements of a movie into a grid, with time moving from left to right, while top to bottom can represent individual characters, movie elements (i.e., musical numbers) or tandem points (commonly referred to by Black as “the good parts”).
Each square of the grid can be accessed with a simple click on the remote control. The determination of how the vertical axis is constructed would be up to the producers or publishers of the disc.
Black created The Matrix in order to increase his ability to get leverage in the retail sales channel. He figures that the big movie studios are going to start demanding shelf space currently held by small CD-ROM developers. If he could create a movie interface that the movie studios bought into, then he could give himself some exposure and space alongside.
The development of The Matrix began with Black’s fascination with how stories are told. The oral history of story telling, he explained to the audience, allowed listeners to interrupt the story teller with questions and reactions. Therefore, allowing the audience of a story or movie the ability to interrupt, find out what happens to that character next (or what already happened) brings the audience “closer to the core of story-telling.”
Black feels that The Matrix is an interface that would not get in the way of the movie. The grid itself would be hidden from view most of the time, popping up only over the image of the movie when called for. It also enables the audience to follow the director’s or author’s path, as well as a path of the audience’s choosing, i.e., a particular character or all of the musical numbers.
To attempt to prove his concept, Xiphias will soon publish four titles that use this interface. Two of them are home reference. There is a Kathy Smith exercise title, which can obviously work either linearly or interactively (“I’ll follow the workout” vs. “I just want to focus on legs today”).
The final new product is a “Tom Clancy-like” thriller called Soft Kill. This story has multiple characters following the same linear time line. Thus, as you watch the movie the second or third time, you may find character motivations or rationales for certain actions.
Soft Kill will be the first story created for this interface, although Black believes that any movie made can work with The Matrix. The Matrix was designed to enable interactivity by exploiting differences in perspective and character, not multiple endings. There was more than a little confusion and some skepticism about how such an interface could be retrofitted to movies already in creation, but the audience did at least seem to understand the rationale behind the interface. We’ll wait and see whether it works for Soft Kill.
‘JUMP THEY SAY’
Ty Roberts, Ion Productions
Ty Roberts is the chairman of Ion Productions, a new software publishing company. Like Brilliant Media, his company is focusing on interactive rock-’n'-roll products. Ion’s goal is to form strategic partnerships with artists from different disciplines to create new media titles, both as individual vehicles and group projects. (For a profile on Ion, see Vol. 2, No. 12, p. 8.)
Roberts demonstrated the first product from Ion, an interactive disc based on David Bowie’s single, “Jump They Say”. The title is in three parts: an interactive video studio, where you make your own music video; a musical slide show; and a virtual environment, where you can witness behind-the-scenes clips of the making of the “Jump They Say” video (MTV’s version), interviews with Bowie, and other activities. The virtual video set is the interface to all of the other facets of this title.
Making your own videos is the high point of the disc. Although Roberts could not show a fully working version (it includes technology currently being patented) he was able to show the interface and explain how it would work. In essence, the user sees five concurrent video streams running simultaneously. Using the mouse on a Macintosh computer, the “video producer” can choose which segment to run when. The technology still under wraps ensures that each clip “works” in synch with the music track.
This CD was created to be bundled with a new computer, not sold as a standalone product. Roberts views this as a “single, not an album,” although he feels that this will be a proof-of-concept title for further interactive rock-’n'-roll titles.
David Bowie collaborated on this disc, but not very directly. He was certainly apprised of the progress, and had a number of meetings and demonstrations with the producers from Ion. (According to Roberts, he was particularly interested in, and pleased by, the quality of the graphics and audio on the disc.) Bowie’s management company was also involved, allowing access to the recordings and video clips necessary to produce this title.
Roberts spoke about the need for artists, especially in music, to become more involved with the new media industry, in order both to learn from and to inspire others to create new kinds of products. He was particularly adamant about the need to create ground-breaking experiences, and to do that, the artist must be directly involved in the total creative process. “(Rick Smolan’s) Alice to Ocean proved to many photographers that there are great possibilities in the new media,” he said. “We still need that for music.”
In order to be a truly ground-breaking product, it must be radically different from anything that came before and it must be available on the new medium. If it can be done on videotape or audio CDs, it’s not worth it. As an example, Roberts cited the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, which he believes is the perfect balance of technology and art concept. The album caused people to break out of the 45-RPM mindset and accept a new platform, the LP record. It could not have been done any other way.
In a way, we are all waiting for the Sgt. Pepper of interactive media.
MYST
John Baker, Brøderbund Software
The final demonstration of the day came from John Baker, vice president of sales and marketing for Brøderbund Software, publishers of computer software for the home and school. Brøderbund is best known for Carmen Sandiego and the Living Books series.
Baker demonstrated the latest title from the people who created Cosmic Osmo and Manhole. Myst, like the previous titles, is an exploration title — an environment is created and the user navigates through it at his or her own pace, finding hidden items, etc. In Myst, however, a mystery is established in the beginning, and it is the job of the reader to solve it.
While reading a book in a library, the reader is transported to a mysterious island, where clues begin to turn up about a somewhat troubled family. It would seem that the husband and wife are trying to determine which of their sons destroyed the ancient library. All that is left are remnants of these ancient texts (although they do contain not only words, but QuickTime videos as well).
The reader must navigate the island, solving puzzles and deciphering clues, until the mystery is solved and the reader can leave the island.
The entire island, which includes five different regions, is rendered in three-dimensional graphics. There are no set paths and the user can navigate the island freely in search of clues and answers. There are sound effects and music throughout, which correspond to particular locations. (See Thomas Dolby’s presentation on p. 45 for ways that audio can be improved.)
Like Cosmic Osmo and The Manhole, one navigates through this environment by simply clicking on the mouse in the direction one wishes to go. However, also like those earlier titles, there is a lag between the click of the mouse and the change in scenery. Unfortunately, this appears to be endemic of random access on CD-ROM (the disc must find the data for the direction you wish to travel, and it could be one of many different possibilities).
While this may give the feeling of stuttering travel, the mystery and the well rendered, deeply intricate environments provide enough to keep a reader/traveler/sleuth engaged for hours. According to Baker, he had been navigating through Myst for an entire weekend, and still hadn’t seen all there was to see on the island.
David Baron